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April 22, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
30:03
[BOMBSHELL] - Max Blumenthal : Netanyahu Plotting.
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Hi, everyone.
Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Wednesday, April 23rd, 2025.
My dear friend Max Blumenthal joins us now.
Max, thank you for your time.
I want to talk to you about Secretary of Defense Hegseth.
I want to talk to you about Iran.
And I want to talk to you about Yemen, particularly the interview that you did with Mr. Al-Bukhati from Ansar al-Allah.
Fascinating, fascinating stuff.
This question may seem a little off the wall, but I've been asking everyone this week, is the death of Pope Francis of any geopolitical significance whatsoever in Israel?
Well, the Israeli foreign ministry retracted its statement of condolences.
Oh Lord, why?
Mourning the Pope.
I don't know, they deleted their tweet mourning him.
And there was celebration on Jewish nationalist telegram channels in Hebrew of the Pope's death.
Pope Francis, who was involved with the Argentinian junta, which during Operation Condor in South America was disappearing, many Jesuit priests who were sheltering dissidents and socialists that these U.S.-backed fascistic regimes were hunting down and disappearing.
Pope Francis at that time, he was a much younger man, collaborated.
And this was a guilt that stayed with him throughout his life.
It was a heavy burden.
And his way of unburdening himself of this guilt was to take some very progressive On the geopolitical stage, opposing war, meeting with Ayatollah al-Sistani in Iraq,
the major Shia cleric in Iraq, in a very respectful and humble way.
And towards the end of his life, every day, Pope Francis would phone the St. Porphyrios Church, which was planted in what is now the Gaza Strip.
During the 8th century, I believe, by Porphyrius himself.
And he was checking in on this congregation that was under siege, where if you walked out of that church, everything around it was in rubble.
And members of the congregation had been killed by Israeli snipers.
And that was his daily task.
So there are a lot of people attacking Pope Francis for various reasons, culture war issues.
No one hated him more than Israel.
You are so smart educating me on things that I should have known.
I honestly thought you were going to say, Judge, there's no significance to his death in Israel.
They're Jewish there.
Don't we have something better to talk about?
But yet again, the depth of your knowledge is extraordinary.
I knew about the phone calls because one of the recipients of those phone calls, Cardinal...
Pizzabella is one of the papabile, one of the people who is being talked about to replace Francis.
I did not know about his involvement with the Argentine juntas.
I knew he was a Peronist, and I'm happy for his efforts to rid himself of that guilt.
He did say something really weird in February.
We need an investigation to determine whether or not there is genocide going on in Gaza.
What? Where have you been for the past two years?
But okay, he was dying and maybe his senses weren't that sufficient.
The question is, what would someone like Pope John Paul or Cardinal Ratzinger, what would they have said?
And I think they would have taken a more pro-US line.
Probably. Probably.
I would love to have seen Francis send Cardinal Parolin, the Secretary of State, right to Netanyahu's face and say, stop.
The world wants you to stop.
You're a criminal.
But it didn't happen.
Here's Ambassador Charles Freeman on a topic that you and I are about to discuss.
I expect you'll agree with what he says.
Chris, cut number 18. Well, I have to say he was more successful as a talking head with greasy hair than he is as Secretary of Defense.
And the fact is that sharing this kind of information with your wife and others on a signal call, they have no need to know this information.
It puts it in jeopardy.
It risks the lives of those carrying out a military operation.
This is the behavior of a small boy.
How do you read the affair Hegseth?
Well, a lot of Hegseth's supporters in MAGA are trying to frame it as a deep state attack and that these are all just fabrications and that the deep state wants him out of the way so it can attack Iran.
And, you know, I wish that I could see it that way.
But Chas Freeman is right.
Pete Hegseth is in over his head.
I hate agreeing with neocons who say this about Pete Hegseth, but it's just so obviously true.
He has no idea what he's doing.
He's never run anything that would provide him with experience to run the world's largest bureaucracy.
And so he put this clown in charge, his chief of staff named Joe Casper, who comes out of Representative Duncan Hunter's office.
Duncan Hunter being one of the biggest stooges for the military leadership and the military-industrial complex in Congress, as well as a drunkard.
And Joe Casper himself, Was unable to complete his tasks inside the Pentagon.
He was failing on the job.
He reportedly showed up to one meeting, high-level meeting in the Pentagon, and walked into the meeting and just said, I just took a massive shit, everyone.
And engaged in bozo behavior, was holding meetings at strip clubs, reportedly.
So Hegseth saw this and tried to do an end around.
Without firing Casper, he started resorting more to efficient, highly knowledgeable figures like Dan Caldwell, who's a significant figure because he was one of the major restrainers who comes out of the right but is suspicious of U.S. regime change wars,
was opposed by the Israel lobby, made it in, and Joe Casper, in his jealousy, Against a jealousy of Caldwell and like two other figures that Hegseth started relying on, went to the media, accused them of leaking and violating,
you know, leaking classified information, leaking that Elon Musk had visited the Pentagon.
So they were frog-marched out under Hegseth's orders.
Hegseth had completely lost control.
And then someone leaks that there's a second signal group.
With Hegseth, his wife, his lawyer, and his brother, and he's providing detailed flight plans.
I mean, I feel like if you're a Starbucks barista and you reveal the secret macchiato recipe, you're going to get fired.
But Pete Hegseth is somehow still in his job claiming everyone's against him.
And the fact is, it does strengthen the hand of the neocons in the White House, like Mike Waltz at the National Security Council.
It does strengthen Netanyahu to have restrainers like Dan Caldwell just frog-marched out of the Pentagon and have this whole apparatus in chaos.
But this is about incompetence.
And who could have ever predicted this would happen under Hagseth?
I was surprised to read the transcript of one of those.
I don't know if I read the transcript of it or if somebody leaked it where Hegseth was advising restraint.
That's not the Hegseth I know.
I was happily surprised to see that.
And now you're telling me that the people that were around him that advised dissent have been pushed out for specious reasons.
Yeah, Dan Caldwell just gave an hour and a half interview to Tucker Carlson, and you can see how well prepared he was for his job.
He's a veteran.
He'd worked with Hegseth at the nonprofit that Hegseth ran and then moved on to Defense Priorities, which is a pretty serious lobbying group on Capitol Hill that wants a more streamlined Pentagon bureaucracy,
doesn't want a trillion dollar Pentagon budget.
It doesn't want regime change wars and was targeted by the main avenue of attack for the Israel lobby is this outlet called Jewish Insider.
It's basically like an Israeli cutout.
And they hammered Caldwell.
They prevented Danny Davis, who I believe has been on your show from getting a post in the Pentagon, where he really would have been a valuable fount of.
He's another veteran who saw...
Strongly on the restraint side.
Strongly on the restraint side.
But it's up to Hegseth to defend his personnel, his guys who have been loyal to him, who have knowledge.
Dan Caldwell's knowledge on the Middle East, on Iran, is impressive.
And he didn't.
He allowed him to be fired.
All alone.
And Joe Casper is probably going to be fired as well.
And then maybe Hegseth is next.
And who's behind Hegseth, by the way?
Oh, God only knows.
Deputy Director of Defense Steve Feinberg, who is the CEO of Cerberus Capital, a private equity firm that has $60 billion in assets and has had major investments.
In Dyncor, I believe in Lockheed Martin, owns a port in the Philippines that arranges shipments of U.S. weapons to confront China.
I mean, he's a walking conflict of interest for the military-industrial complex.
And it seems to me that Feinberg was placed in his position as this billionaire in order to convince or mollify senators like Lindsey Graham or Roger Wicker, who are suspicious of Hegseth.
You know, that there would be a steady status quo hand who's fully invested in the financial objectives of the military-industrial complex.
And for all I know, Feinberg could replace Hegseth tomorrow.
Who chose Feinberg?
President Trump?
Trump did.
I mean, he's like one of Trump's, you know, buddies from the private equity predator class.
This is a guy, you know, he does roll-ups.
He'll buy 30 healthcare companies or senior homes and then roll them all up so there's no competition in the market and then begin reducing services.
It's one of the sleaziest professions in human history.
And he has a substantial influence over the Pentagon.
Well, one of the viewers...
Is making a suggestion of somebody who's interested in the job, which totally turns my stomach, Senator Cotton.
That, of course, would be horrific.
That would be neocon central right there.
It would be, and Cotton has been proposed as, was initially proposed as a frontrunner for defense secretary.
Trump was considering him, so it was like almost...
You think, oh, it's a relief Pete Hegseth's in there because he's just going to do whatever Trump tells him.
He's just a front man from the Fox News green room to another figure from the green room to the White House or to the Pentagon.
But I knew that Pete Hegseth wouldn't last long in this job.
And if you go back to his confirmation hearings, it's pretty clear that he was in over his head.
Yeah, yeah.
They twisted the arm of Tom Tillis.
The senator from North Carolina, who was a fierce opponent of Hegseth, who talked Hegseth's, one of his former wives, into giving a lot of testimony against him, and then Tillis ended up voting for him, and they had the 50 votes, and the vice president broke the tie.
Switching gears, I read in the Financial Times this morning where Yair Lapid, the opposition leader in the Knesset, Made a startling statement with respect to Netanyahu's administration of affairs in Israel.
We will soon see Jews killing Jews.
Do you know what he's talking about?
Are things that bad domestically in Israel?
Well, of course they are.
And it wouldn't be anything new.
I mean, Netanyahu incited the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin.
Over the Oslo Accords.
Netanyahu has polarized Israeli politics deliberately in order to maintain power longer than any other Israeli Prime Minister.
And now you have a substantial segment of Israeli society which has been politically defeated by the nationalist right.
Out in the streets, shutting down traffic because they understand clearly that Netanyahu will do anything to prevent a hostage deal.
It's a hostage deal that Hamas just offered where they offered to release every single hostage in exchange for a permanent cessation of hostilities and an end to an Israeli presence in the Gaza Strip.
But ever since last summer, 2024, Netanyahu has been, after the military objectives for the Israelis were all achieved in Gaza, and a deal was clearly on the table, Netanyahu began deploying deceptions,
leaking fake information to German tabloids like Bild and Jewish Insider, or sorry, British.
pro-Israel publications that Yahya Senwar, then the leader of Hamas, was planning to spirit hostages out of the Gaza Strip through the Philadelphia Corridor into Egypt.
And that's why Netanyahu needed to continuously occupy the Philadelphia Corridor.
We just learned through an Israeli investigative report that a tunnel that was at the center of Netanyahu's presentation at that time to the Israeli public, which he said you could drive a jeep through.
And presented this photo of a jeep coming out of a tunnel in the Philadelphia corridor was actually a sand berm that the Israeli military had erected for propaganda purposes.
So just one fraud and deception after another.
Now you have this Qatargate scandal, which is roiling Netanyahu's administration where members of his team, close inner circle, have been exposed for being on the take from Qatar in exchange for propagandizing.
On behalf of Doha.
And as long as the war continues and Netanyahu keeps the regional tensions at a, at least at a simmer, if not moving them towards a boiling point, then that scandal will not undo him.
Ami Ayalon, the former head of the Shin Bed, Israel's General Security Service, said last weekend in the Financial Times that the war was basically over by last May or June a year ago.
And ever since then, Netanyahu has just been delaying it, which means playing with the lives of the Israelis that are left in Gaza, which is causing, again, a substantial slice of the Israeli public to demand his ouster.
Dan Halutz, former Israeli Army Chief of Staff, said Netanyahu needs to be grabbed and taken physically out of the Prime Minister's office.
Oh, good Lord.
Chris, I don't know what the number is on our cuts, but I want to play for Max,
spokesperson, the female spokesperson for the Israeli foreign ministry.
Iran cannot have nuclear weapon, and this is what's in front of us.
We understand it's not just a threat to Israel, but to the entire...
What about Israel?
Israel is not posing a threat to anyone.
We don't have any ambitions in any other country.
Iran has ambition in the entire Middle East.
And so Iran is a threat to the entire world.
And Israel is at the front line.
At the front line of stopping the worst enemy the world can...
And I don't understand that question.
With all respect, the question was not about Iran.
Who is Israel posing a threat on?
Israel has never provoked, has never attacked unprovokingly a neighboring country or someone else.
This has always been on the defense of our country and our people.
We have no ambition.
Israel is the key for stabilizing the Middle East.
So if Iran abandons its nuclear program, Israel will do the same?
Israel is what's stabilizing the Middle East.
Iran is what's destabilizing, arming, and terrorizing the entire population around.
And so, disarming Iran is not Israel's interest.
It's your interest.
It's international community's interest.
Try and imagine what is happening right now in the Middle East with Iran's nuclear weapons.
It's not just a threat on Israel.
It's a threat on the entire world.
Regrets. One is that you were not there in that room to interrogate her.
And the other is that we don't have the two or three hours it would take to dissect and deconstruct the nonsense that came out of that woman's mouth.
Yeah, a nice mashup by Chris to really capture the absurdity of it.
Proposing Israel as the stabilizing force in the Middle East that has never attacked provocally.
And this is in response to a reporter from RT asking, I think the most important question to ask any U.S. State Department spokesperson or Israeli MFA spokesperson is which country currently has nuclear weapons in the Middle East,
in the region?
And they can't answer the question.
So she was filibustering angrily, breathlessly.
Because she could not address the question, which is that Israel maintains over 250 nuclear warheads, which are produced at its facility, once secret, at Dimona, which is exempted from IAEA inspections.
And we can't really explain why it's gotten this exemption.
Is it because of the Holocaust?
I mean, what is the reason that they can then threaten the world with a nuclear holocaust?
But this is the most destabilizing factor in the Middle East, aside from the structure, the political structure of Israel, which is based on Zionist ethno-supremacist lines.
The nuclear weapons place everyone in the crosshairs, including Europe, which as Seymour Hersh revealed in the 70s, could be targeted through Israel's Samson option.
If Israel feels like it is existentially threatened and the West cuts it off, it will use nuclear blackmail.
Why are we freaking out now about Iran having a nuclear program?
It's because if Iran manages to produce nuclear-grade weapons, it can be a deterrent that will prevent regime change.
And the real goal here is not to denuclearize Iran.
For Israel, it is about protecting its own nuclear priorities so it can control the entire region and so that it can advance regime change against Iran and reduce Iran to a fourth-rate power that eventually normalizes with it,
put it in the same position that Syria is in today.
That's what this is about.
If Iran develops nuclear weapons, that will actually have a stabilizing effect because it will deter the most destabilizing force possibly on the planet, which that highly aggressive woman with a Rick James haircut represents.
You recently interviewed, I believe you interviewed him, Mohammed al-Bukhati.
Addressing American support for invasion of Yemen.
Tell us about that and then we'll run a little clip from the interview.
Well, now that the U.S. is bombing Yemen, targeting civilians, and there's this reverberation in Washington of the Signal Gate scandal, which seems to be the only scandal about this war in which the U.S. is slaughtering civilians,
has bombed a civilian port in Ras Aisa, which serves two thirds of Yemen, and in which a ground invasion of Saudi and Emirati mercenaries serving the interests,
I thought it was important to go back to Mohammed al-Bukhaiti, who is the senior political officer in Ansar Allah, the movement that controls the Yemeni territory that's under attack by the U.S.,
and which is fighting to stop We are ready for the battle,
even if we have to wage it on three fronts, whether they be internally, regionally or internationally.
We are preparing for these new fronts because we are confident that the U.S. will fail and its direct military operations will lead it to other options, whether these options include the targeting of Yemeni civilians or, when they've tried that, to throw the Saudi and Emiratis into Yemen or to move their mercenaries in Yemen.
All these options of a ground invasion will be supported by U.S. air support, of course.
Let me also add that if the US moves their mercenaries, it will not play out according to their plan.
The Yemeni people will not appreciate this and they will mobilize to destroy those playing defense for the Zionist entity.
After all, the Yemeni people are eager to fight the Israelis more directly in order to support their people in Gaza.
So using these options of different fronts won't help the Americans achieve any of their goals.
They will only lose their tools in the region.
You the interviewer in that interview?
Yeah, I conducted that interview and was able to do it thanks to the translation of my colleague, Hekmat Abu Khattar.
The Houthis, or Ansar Allah, have been portrayed as crazy in Western media.
They have been labeled as terrorists by the U.S. government.
And I think what you see from this interview is the logic of...
Which is rooted in historical analysis and, I think, a fairly realistic assessment of the political objectives of their historic adversaries.
The logic behind the Houthis or Ansar Allah's attempt to impose a blockade in the Red Sea.
Why are they doing it?
Mainly for ideological reasons.
Because they believe...
That the oppressed in the world should be defended.
It's a responsibility to protect operation, a humanitarian intervention.
What I would call an actually principled R2P operation because it's being done in defense of the most betrayed, oppressed, abandoned people on the planet in Gaza.
And what they have said is, we are not seeking to attack US shipping.
We're only going after Israeli shipping.
It's been a largely bloodless operation, was until the U.S. commenced this Operation Rough Rider under Pete Hegseth.
And they will end it as soon as the U.S. enforces the ceasefire that it signed in January.
In fact, it all ended and shipping was moving smoothly until the U.S. greenlit Israel's fracturing of the ceasefire and renewed bloodbath in Gaza.
But also, Yemen is facing...
Has faced down the might of the empire through the Saudi-UK-US assault, which ended under the Biden administration because they just couldn't defeat them.
They just were losing on the battlefield.
And that was a blow to American empire because it showed that their partners in the region were weak and that the US...
Wasn't going to be able to provide enough backing for them to justify the extortion money that they pay to the U.S., allowing them to have U.S. basing in order to protect their oil fields.
Now, if they lose again here, what Bukhaiti is saying is it will be an even bigger blow to U.S. empire.
It will expose the U.S. as...
You know, empty suit.
The emperor has no clothes because he can't protect all of these monarchies, which are basically glorified family business oil companies, and that they will actually have to start to negotiate with the Houthis who are not Sunni.
And so there's this antagonism.
And they will, in turn, also have to move closer to Iran and work out a kind of regional agreement.
And that's something the U.S. does not want to see.
It's a divide-and-conquer strategy.
So that's why this war is so critical.
And an invasion, as I said, of Yemeni Ansarallah-held territory by Saudi and Emirati mercenaries could begin at any moment.
And among those mercenaries are al-Qaeda-aligned fanatics.
I don't know how this is going to end, but again, the United States is committing war crimes.
We know from the first signal transcript, the one that was leaked to Jeffrey Goldberg, that they attacked an apartment building because, quote, a bomb maker was going to visit his girlfriend.
Pardon me when I talked about this.
Yeah. Well, they said, we're going to kill the top missile guy, but Mike Waltz didn't know who he was.
Okay, let's say they got the top missile guy.
The second-ranking missile guy has been pretty effective because every two or three days, Ansar Allah is able to launch one of their homemade Palestine ballistic missiles or Jaffa ballistic missiles towards Israeli territory.
One was just intercepted over Haifa a few hours ago.
And this shows the failure of the United States.
They have not been able...
to suppress Ansar Allah's missiles.
They have not been able to restore freedom of movement to the Red Sea.
They have had to send a second aircraft carrier, the USS Carl Vincent, into southeastern Yemen in preparation for a ground invasion, which is a sign of desperation.
The United States, with the most powerful air force and navy in human history, is unable to defeat a local I mean,
the breadth of his knowledge is simply extraordinary.
We are thrilled to have him here.
Coming up at 3 o'clock this afternoon on the suppression of Christianity, especially Catholicism, in its birthplace, Israel.
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